In 1998 I had the belief that to really grow my national business I needed to design a technology marketing solution that would set us apart from the larger competitors and streamline operations. To achieve the mission I found a programmer who knew the language of the web and of servers (msql at the time) and from little boxes drawn on the paper tablemats in a Chinese restaurant, along with an investment of 3k an early CMS was developed.

It was fantastic. The business grew from a couple of clients and 250k in revenue to 3mil almost overnight. Clients were wowed by the fact that they could request ad changes and approve their ads (often 100 of them at one time) all electronically. They were also amazed that their requested ad changes were made in what appeared “real time”.

What they didn’t know was that on top of being the owner and sole employee of the company at the time I was also the “real time” marketing strategy. This meant I was on call 24 hours a day to perform the ad changes from wherever I was, including from a picnic table, via Satellite internet, from a remote outpost location, and with the aid of generator power.

These were the early days of the Internet and technology marketing solutions. Now technology marketing solutions are much more complex because the amount of information businesses collect on customers has increased exponentially in terms of volume, variety and complexity.  Commonly used software tools to capture, manage and process this data are for the most part inadequate.

Technology has clearly expanded the strategy canvass. Everyday 2.5 quintillion bytes of data are created. To those who embrace the new game of technology marketing there are new ways of doing things and new things to do. While this is a challenge for some companies others are leveraging the opportunity to drive their businesses to gain greater competitive advantage and higher profits. Managing Big Data like managing Big Hair requires a clever design and maintenance strategy to be successful. At the end of the day the value of Big Data is in finding the information that is critical to your company’s success.